Every Other Time
by Musafreen
Summary: /percabeth drabble collection. and really, that's pretty much everything you need to know.
1. Property Lines

**Notes:**Yes, I do realize this is short, and that it is pointless. But this came into being as a spinoff from my drabble collection, and I hate seeing anything languishing in my laptop. Will possibly end up being a set of seven vaugely-themed drabbles. Kinda doubtful, though. Like 'em much better as a beta couple.

But still. What kind of PJO fanfic writer would you be if you never wrote a Percabeth? :D

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* * *

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**Property Lines**

* * *

There were days when she wanted to drag her boyfriend down to the depths of the ocean and leave him tied to a rock there. But with all the Nerieds hanging around him like he was the cutest thing since Theseus, it'd probably end up backfiring. The Underworld might have been a more viable option, except for how she wanted him locked up in a tower somewhere, not suffocated to death by a vindictive Lord Hades.

If this kept up, however, she might think about settling for it.

She watched, eyes narrowed, as Percy took another order from a group of starry-eyed, giggling girls. _Now_ she knew why the court's owners ignored the occasional mysterious fire- it looked like most of the business they had came from thirteen-year olds collectively ogling her ever-oblivious boyfriend.

_Get a grip on yourself, Annabeth. You're acting like a jealous little man-obsessive harpy._

Another girl, this one closer to her own age, took the time off to glance appreciatively at Percy. The fact that she immediately went back to hanging on her guy's arm and listening to his every word ceased to matter. Annabeth saw red, and started planning ways to have Percy get his butt out of this place. People could find someone else to ogle.

"I don't like that look," Percy said, stopping near her, "What are you planning?"

She glared at him and he backed off. Kelp-for-brains or not, he'd been pretty adept at deciphering all of her warning signals… well, most of the time, anyway.

She caught the time in her watch and sighed. Ten more minutes before his shift got over and she could go back to being normal. Forget hubris; sometimes she thought overzealous protectiveness was her Flaw. Rabid jealousy featured somewhere in the package too.

She had _issues,_ oh yes.

She stirred what was left of her smoothie with a straw, and instinctively shot a preemptive glare at the cute redhead in the waitress uniform.

"Okay, seriously," Percy stopped again on his way to one of the other tables, "I don't like that look. Who're you planning to kill here?"

"None of your business, Seaweed Brain."

"Actually, if you're going to-"

"Percy!" The redheaded waitress called, her face all smiles.

Percy broke off with a wince and started walking again. Annabeth finished slurping up her smoothie and joined him on his Quest To Deliver The Perfect Burgers To A Group OF Teen Bimbos.

"I'll get off in five minutes," he hissed from the corner of his mouth, "Can you please _stay_ there till then?"

"No."

"Don't scare away the customers."

She shook her sleeve, and the reassuring weight of her brand new celestial bronze knife rattled against her. She accompanied the sound with a pointed look.

Percy gave up, thus helping to form a legion of intimidated females.


	2. Caffinated Supports

**Notes: **So, in Architecture; sleep is a rationed luxury. _Believe me. _And this had turned into the dumping ground for any Percabeth drabbles I might write. Highly original, I know.

And I am _**not**_ trying to bash Rachel here.

**

* * *

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**Caffinated Supports**

* * *

She was, at her best, a quivering, stuttering mass of barely checked impulses held together by spit and duct tape and power of will and caffine. Lots and lots and lots of caffine.

She'd given in, gone invisible and stolen Rachel's percolator. Artist-girl didn't have half a dozen cranky immortals demanding cabins and temples be drawn out, detailed and redesigned according to their own individual expertise (_"Annabeth, babe. That statue of mine is entirely too small! How can it expect to capture my magnificence?"_), along with about the double number of minor gods making quibbles about their cabins at camp (_"Hey, builder-girl. I'm god of fear, not exposed brickwork."_), _along _with a batch of sadistic professors handing out _hand-drafting_ assignments in her first year of official Architectural study…

No. Rachel with her art-major had it _easy,_ she was sure. Annabeth needed a hell lot more coffee than she did at the point. The percolator was in right hands.

Besides, she hated all artists at this point. _Hand-drafting. _Ugh.

She glared in distaste at her drawing board, and Percy walked in holding the phone to his ear.

"Uh-huh," he was saying. "Yeah, I'll tell her. Calm down, Rachel. I'll get the thing over to you in an hour or so…"

"Percy," she said, holding out her hand, "Hand over the phone."

"She already hung up," Percy informed her, obeying. "Why did you steal Rachel's coffee machine again? You know she gets all screechy without it."

She couldn't believe she was hearing this. Who's boyfriend was he anyway?

"Do we live together or don't we?" she asked him via gritted teeth.

Percy looked wary, "Is that a trick question?"

"I haven't slept in _thirty-six_ hours, Percy," she growled. "Read my lips. _Thirty. Six. _Excuse me if I don't want to give back the percolator."

"Why don't you just go out and buy one?" he asked. His tone suggested she was being stupid. He, kelp-for-brains, was insinuating _she_ was stupid.

Gods, had she sunk to a new low. But the beauty of being sleep-deprived was how much you ceased to care.

"Because if I had the _time,_ I'd go get some damned _sleep._"

"Then let me go and get one for you," he rolled his eyes, "You're so grumpy this morning."

"I'm sleep-deprived! I'm entitled!"

"Oh come on, we've stayed up for longer than-"

"We weren't working, Percy," she screeched, "We were watching movies! And making out! It's completely _different! _Do you have any idea how much brainstorming I had to do so far? Do you?"

"Jeez," Percy backed away, "Annabeth, calm down. And put down the knife."

"_Calm down? _Do _you_ have nineteen designs to have ready by day after tomorrow?" she advanced, _not_ putting down the knife, "And now I've used up my last dose of caffine yelling at you. Thanks a lot, by the way."

"Um," Percy backwalked to the door, looking terrified, "So I'll leave you then?"

"Before I stab you. Yes."

"Gotcha. I'll go tell Rachel about the coffee thing."

Rachel got back her coffeemaker three days later, when she had laryngitis from all the yelling she had done at Percy. Percy gifted one to Annabeth as soon as he could find an excuse.


	3. Dampened Dates

**Notes: **All right, so I realize I have a horrible pun for a chapter name. Possibly another one for the drabble collection itself. But I can't _help_ it, dammit. I'm addicted to bad puns. Or terrible pun like things, at any rate.

**

* * *

Dampened Dates**

* * *

For a while there, he'd thought everything would go well.

Of course, at the time, Percy had to admit it made perfect sense. They were in a semi-fancy restraint in semi-formal clothing. They were smiling at each other over the menu and trying to decide what the best food for the most economical price would be. Her eyes had crinkled up at the corners, and he had been grinning like a goofy idiot. There was an almost palpable tension in the air that assured him that, oh yes, his efforts were going to pay off and he was most definitely going to get some tonight.

Then a hydra (a freaking _hydra,_ of all things) had to come in via the kitchen in a stream of acid, which was _not_ something they had thought about ordering.

Annabeth's eyes stopped crinkling, and she glanced at the monster.

"Oh look," she remarked, somewhat dispassionately, "It's a multiheaded monster ruining our date. For the... twenty-eighth time now, was it?"

"Ninth," Percy muttered, wishing he didn't have enough pride to eschew going to a corner and crying his eyes out.

"Really?"

"If we count the thing with the hot dog vendor and the Canadians, yeah."

"I don't think we can get away with being politically incorrect anymore, Percy," Annabeth rolled her eyes, "Do you want me to pronounce it _slowly and clearly_ for you? Lai. Stry-"

"Acid cloud!"

There was a tussle. It involved screeching and screaming and Annabeth raiding the kitchens with a tablecloth. Fifteen minutes later, what was left of the hydra was turning into dust, the other customers were staring them with sheer horror in their eyes and a short, stout man with a determined expression was steadily making his way towards them.

Again. Of course.

The manager hadn't come down to tell him thank you for saving his customers from becoming main course either. His rant was more along the lines of you-delinquents-get-out-of-here-before-I-call-the-police. Percy wasn't surprised or disappointed; he knew the people in charge tended to get mad when things burned down on their watch. He knew it _intimately._

Another five minutes later, they were walking despondently down the street, their clothes a mess half eaten by acid and half scorched by fire.

"So?" asked Percy. He knew this routine.

"I rented Clash of the Titans this time. It's fun to watch."

"Don't you have any faith in me?" he wondered.

"It's not a matter of faith," Annabeth said, "You just always have a backup plan."

"You _don't_ have any faith in me," he surmised.

"When it comes to this?" Annabeth said, "No. But cheer up. We'll spend the rest of the night making out anyway."

Well, at least he knew how to take the positives where he could find them.


	4. Training Technique

**Notes: **Yes, that down there is an angst story. XD I'd forgotten how theraputic writing angst was.

On an unrelated note, I _throughly_ suck at titles.

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**Training Technique**

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_Stab. Dodge. Kick._

Contrary to popular opinion, she wasn't instantly good at _everything_ she tried. Once in a while being effortlessly good took effort. Namely, hours of going at the punching bags and straw dummies like they had done her great personal wrong.

They had faces, the punching bags. She could see them clearly in her head, and they were what kept her going at full power for literal hours. Simple straw dummies didn't deserve that kind of hurt. It was a classic example of projecting anxieties (and she knew it), but she preferred to think of it as a healthy outlet for frustrations. At least this way, people didn't get hurt.

She did not count those idiots who sneaked upon her in this state of mind among 'people', and anyway, it hadn't happened in a while. Camp Half-Blood was not usually populated by suicidal maniacs.

_Crouch. Swing. Stab again._

She'd started doing this almost since she'd first come to Camp. Back then, the dummies looked had looked strangely like everything from Furies to Cyclopses to her Stepmother to Chiron in I-don't-care-how-bored-you-are-you're-still-not-going-out mode. Mostly though, they had looked like Thalia.

She told herself that it was not really rational_, _the way her imagination happily tacked the face of the girl she'd admired the most in the world to the dummy she was attempting to pulverize, but it didn't really have much of an effect. Quite the contrary, she was at her most violent when it was Thalia. She tended to slash with all her might, deliver bone-breaking kicks and had even _clawed_ at the dummy sometimes.

She was smart enough to recognize why, once she'd started thinking about it. Monsters and other unimportant people trying to mess up her life was a given, and she sneered at anything trying to make her lose her cool that way. It hurt a hell lot more when someone you loved went ahead and let you down.

_Lunge. Arced slash. Retreat._

Thalia had gotten herself killed. She'd went down in a mess of blood and monster slime, and was hated for it. Mostly for making her watch it from where she couldn't help. Because she could have done _something_, she could have helped _somehow_ and god, that bitch should have at least let her stay and _help._

_Stab. Stab. Rip._

And then when she was twelve, she started seeing Luke.

It was something of a relief, really. By then, she was feeling guilty about all the rage she'd poured at the Thalia manikin- and maybe on the way to admitting that maybe it wasn't Thalia's fault after all. Luke's offense was so much nearer, so much simpler, and so much more easy to take offense at. Hating a traitor was also _saner_ than hating the friend who'd walked into death just so you could live.

And for a while there, she even convinced herself that it was all about Luke turning against all of them and not caring about the possibility of destroying the whole world, and not about him turning his back on _her_.

It had all been so clean and simple and logical. Luke was a jerk and deserved to be castrated, and so she obliged her sadistic inner mauler to victimize him. She got trained he got injured in spirit. It was payback for the whole turing-into-an-evil-overlord thing.

_Breathe. Slash. Retreat._

Then he'd tricked her into holding the Sky, which put her through a world of hurt so intense she couldn't really tell where the physical pain ended and the mental began. And then she'd hacked at the dummies with everything she could muster, because she still loved him despite it. The realization might have hurt worse; she couldn't really tell. Back then, all she could care about was how he kept breaking her heart, and she kept _letting_ him.

After a while, she'd almost started to forget. She'd almost got over the fact that he existed and had _almost_ designated him into the 'nameless Titan Commander' post. And _then_ he'd gone and killed himself over a promise he made to her about a decade ago.

It had taken them months to replace the dummies she'd gone through in the span of a week.

_Stab. Slash. Claw._

She stepped back, breathed in and reminded herself that this was practice for hidebound monsters and that clawing at them was not likely to have much effect.

It had been pretty bad, but she'd taken comfort in the fact that it was _over_, and had fervently wished never to go through anything of the sort again.

She'd assumed that the Fates pointed and laughed at her even as she'd thought it. But she hadn't expected this to happen a few measly _months_ later.

_Breathe. Stance. Tense. _

It was happening again, and it was distressingly familiar. The person she cared about the most in the world was not with her anymore, and that made her furious. With the rest of the world too, but mostly with him.

Percy had no real excuse for upsetting her like this. He was freaking _invincible,_ which meant he couldn't go and get himself killed without effort. His fatal flaw was loyalty, so he wasn't supposed to be susceptible to random tempters from the dark side. She was safe from any grief-mongering idiocy from his side, even if he made up for that in plain old idiocy.

But Percy being Percy had found an entirely new way to annoy her and had vanished without a trace. Just like that.

_Attack. Attack. Attack. _

Nobody knew where he was, Iris messages wouldn't reach him. All she'd got from Rachel was some vague comment about a shoe. She'd stubbornly avoided trying to contact Nico till he showed up and told her that no, there was no news from his side, so could she please stop trying to pretend that he didn't exist and try giving him something to do?

Like that was much comfort. Luke and Thalia hadn't been in the Underworld either. She thought it was all distressingly similar.

She'd lost Thalia to the Hunt. She'd lost Luke to Kronos. And now she was going to lose _Percy_-

_Slash. Rip- _

Annabeth Chase stabbed the dismembered figure one last time, dropped to the ground, and cried.


	5. Survival Instincts

**Notes:** This turned out to be more world-building than Percabeth. :-/ But it's really not something I feel comfortable creating a brand new story for, so here goes...

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**Survival Instincts**

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One, his name was Percy Jackson. Or so they told him, anyway. He decided to go along with it because it was simpler that way.

Two, he owned a retractable sword with a three-foot blade. He could say with certainty that it was his, because it kept coming back into his pocket if he dropped it. Unless it was a sword with stalker tendencies, which would be weird even for his life.

Three, he could talk to fish. He wasn't sure about this one, and he tried not to think about it too much. He could also talk to horses, but apparently that was pretty common and not weird at all. Go figure.

Four, his skin was some sort of impregnable armor. This was really weird, even for a guy living in a military camp run by talking wolves.

Five, the alpha talking wolf had told him that goddess or no goddess, he had to prove himself to her pups before she'd even considered letting him _fight_ beside her Legion. Which was why he was _somewhere_, covered in muck and crouched in the shadow of a large rock absolutely infested with ants.

He was so glad he couldn't feel them biting him.

"And how are _you_ holding up?"

Hazel, who was also covered in muck but looked sexy as hell in spite of it, grinned at him. Probably to drive in the fact that she'd snuck upto him without him noticing and could have very well killed him by now. Or at least that she could have done it if he hadn't had natural full-body armor.

"Is it always this boring?" he wondered.

"It's a stakeout," Hazel said, kneeling down beside him, "So yes."

"Why do you people even do this, anyway?"

"_We,_" Hazel corrected, "do this to know what our enemies are planning, how they move and mobilize and what potential weaknesses they have."

He gave her an extremely skeptical look.

"It's combat intelligence 101, Superman," she told him, "All the advantage you can get."

"Isn't there an easier way?"

"What, like waiting in your tent while until divine forces tell you what's going to happen and what you have to do?"

Percy frowned, "Actually, that sounds-"

"It was sarcasm, Jackson. Please tell me you didn't think I was serious."

There was silence for a few minutes as Percy tried to remember why he was suddenly thinking about rhymes.

"So," he said, giving up, "Found anything?"

"Nothing specific," Hazel said, "There's something major going on, like Titan Uprising major, but no one seems to know the details, and the stories are getting really weird. Bronze dragon parts falling from the sky and all that."

"Weird," Percy agreed.

"Yeah._ And_ we don't know where Jason is," Hazel said, "We need him. Dakota and Reyna are going to kill each other in a month if he doesn't get his ass back to Camp."

"Oh yeah. That was one _mean_ fire."

"And it'll only get worse. I think Dakota's researching lightning magic."

Cue synchronized shuddering. Some things were just plain terrifying to bear thinking about.

"I'm glad you're around," Hazel said, moving closer, "We could use a human fire extinguisher at this point. And actually, I'm glad you're around _anyway_."

"Really?"

"Yeah. I mean, every guy in Camp is either does not know how to have fun or is obnoxious. You're refreshing, Percy, and I'm not the only one with that opinion. Getting some alone time with you took a lot of effort."

Percy blinked, "What?"

She grinned at him and moved her head closer, and his heartbeat sped up a little. Since he'd been forced to hang out with the Tribunes, Hazel had been the one person he could actually talk to without getting disdainful sniffs and resentful glares every two minutes. And she was pretty, like _really_ pretty-

Her lips met his just as his instincts screamed at him. Percy jerked away and scanned the shadows.

"What's wrong?" Hazel asked, hand moving to her _gladius_. They had learned to trust Percy's instincts, (no questions asked) by now.

"I-" The feeling was gone just as suddenly as it had appeared, "I thought I- False alarm, I think."

For a moment there, Hazel looked like she might advocate a quick getaway/area search, but then she shrugged and leaned over to kiss him again.

She felt his lips meet hers, accompanied by a surge of _ohmygodshe's**hot**_ and, inexplicably, the feeling that there was something very, very wrong with her lips. They should have been softer, but a little less fuller-

And then panic surged through him again and he leapt back from her, smacking his head loudly on the rock.

"Percy, what's _wrong_ with you?" Hazel, predictably enough, sounded a little peeved.

"I can't," he gasped out, his mouth working without interference from his brain, "She'll kill me."

"What?"

"Annabeth will kill me. No wait- she'll castrate me and _then_ she'll kill me."

For a moment, there was almost-complete silence, interrupted only by the sound of someone panting heavily.

"Who," Hazel enunciated, "Is Annabeth."

His mouth, which wasn't on autopilot anymore, declined to help.

"I- don't know?" He said, a little weakly.

"Well, whoever she is, you've managed to lead those laistrygonians to us," Hazel said, pointing somewhere behind his head, "Congratulations."

Percy drew Riptide and turned around to fight two cannibal giants, while Hazel dismembered a third with a murderous look on her face, very deliberately not looking at him unless she absolutely had to.

And therefore, in conclusion, this amnesia thing was a giant pain in the butt.


End file.
